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The Santo Spirito Altarpiece

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The Santo Spirito Altarpiece conclusion The Santo Spirito Altarpiece Santo Spirito’s choir altarpieces appear to have been the objects of a highly self-conscious and purposive intentionality. That intentionality was certainly aimed at meeting the expectations of its chapel patrons. At the same time, it ensured that images were deployed strategically in the choir so as to serve the programmatic goals of the convent’s Augustinian Hermit friars—asserting the friars’ authority, recreating the old church within the fabric of the new, helping fashion the choir into a Marian sacred space that reflected the friars’ otherworldly aspirations, and providing the material for devotional and medi- tational praxis. In 1505, Raffaellino del Garbo painted his Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints John the Evangelist, Lawrence, Stephen, and Bernard (the Segni al- tarpiece) (fig. 8.1) for the chapel of Bernardo di Stefano Segni in the left arm of the choir. Although roughly square like the other altarpieces of the choir, Del Garbo’s painting was larger than those works and included four rather than two saints. Its cinquecentesque putti, multi-tiered composition and volu- metric figures reflect the influence of Fra Bartolomeo and Leonardo. Despite these innovations, the painting’s symmetrical composition recalls other choir altarpieces in several respects: the foreground saints John the Evangelist and Bernard of Clairvaux are positioned close to the picture plane and the smooth ground is a nonspecific tan. In addition, Saints Lawrence and Stephen, depicted as beautiful and virtu- ally identical young men in embroidered dalmatics, are placed on either side of Mary’s throne. The position and appearance of the two saints assimilates them to the equally identical adolescent angels that flank Mary’s throne in the earlier altarpieces of the left arm, a device that helps mitigate the aberrant presence of four saints within the panel.1 In the altar-frontal below, two an- gels reproduce the gesture of the altarpiece’s putti by pulling aside a curtain to display the figure of the chapel’s dedicatee, Saint Lawrence. The two putti above and the angels below may function to alert the viewer to the left arm 1 Saints Lawrence and Stephen were the Church’s first deacons. The lower orders of angels who minister to humanity were sometimes associated with deacons and appear wearing deacons’ stoles in Quattrocento images of heaven. Gill, Angels, 24; Lightbown, “Heaven Depicted,” 82. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004419896_010 312 conclusion figure 8.1 Raffaellino del Garbo, Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints John the Evangelist, Lawrence, Stephen, and Bernard (the Segni altarpiece), 1505, Santo Spirito, Florence Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY motif of twin angels mimicked in the altarpiece by the figures of Lawrence and Stephen. The altarpiece also references the theology of the Incarnation as expressed in the Gospel of John, a favorite topic of Augustine, as we have seen. Seated on a low bench in the immediate foreground, Saints John the Evangelist and Bernard, like Saint Nicholas in Piero di Cosimo’s Visitation, hold open books whose contents are partially legible. John’s book recalls the one he held in Lorenzetti’s Maestà in Massa Marittima, adorned in that case with the initial “I” (fig. 1.5). Here, the book is inscribed with the entire opening line of John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” the verse on which Augustine grounded his arguments for the .
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